Intro

Credits

Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel and the Istituto Svizzero di Roma are proud to announce their first Summer Academy, to be held at Villa Maraini, Rome, from 17 to 21 July 2017, with the title We Are Dreaming Lies Again!.

Transformation is the talk of the town. Ten years ago, it was creativity and innovation, but now it’s transformation. There’s nothing negative about these waterfalls of concepts that inundate our public communication, from social media to press releases. We need to look at them with positivity, since they’re there to create a collective force that names our desires and our fear of stagnation, of entropy. However, art is too slow to wash away the feeling of sameness; it is also far too slow to be new. Yet it is the wonderful slowness that allows the possibility, not of research dreams, or business notions of a surprising something changing our lives, but the silent invention that comes into life slowly, steadily, joyfully hidden in the substance of artist doing what they do, art.

We Are Dreaming Lies Again! comprises a small group of ten students who will make art together, reflecting on how the ritual of making can invent new approaches to apprehension, substances, and situations that may or may not have anything to do with art directly. Local guests will be invited to share their experiences with ours, and to discover and help shape, if anything, an eccentric meta group performance, leaving traces to seed new ideas on how to proceed into the future. And so, like in an improvised circus, some will do their numbers, while others will provide a voice over, like the ringmaster who wants you to perform while the most amazing human and animal feats are happening.

It is only in such a context of freedom that forms of thinking through sharing and transferring happen, and the thinking is the basis for invention. We know too well that hope is only the other name for what emerges and stays to make life continuously possible.